Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I’ve been pretty vocal in the forums as of late, live and beta about the state of the Priest. I am not trying to be one of the “we are the most broken class ever!” type people but I do think we have some issues.

I think Priests are good healers, I still think we have many more advantages over Paladins and Druids. They have strengths and weaknesses just like we do. People tend to focus on their strengths and our weaknesses By far I think we have the most interesting set of abilities to heal with vs those other healing classes. I do get depressed with the lack of attention we were given in BC at times and have been known to forget how much I do enjoy being a Priest.

Basically I found a really good post that outlines exactly what I feel are the problems with Priests going into BC that really need to be addressed. I don’t know who originally wrote them but I am 100% in agreement with them. I thought I’d post them so that if people are providing “feedback” we can provide well written accurate feedback

• Healing Spell – general

In general healing spells as found on the TBC Beta haven’t been scaling properly with the increases in Stamina. It is nice that Blizzard wants fights to last longer, but with an Increase in Stamina also means there should be an increase in Healing to compensate for it. Seeing as there has not been an increase to compensate many healers, not just Priests, are feeling the strain. This is one of the more important problems that need to be looked into and addressed after TBC is released.


What I would add to this point is how much more damage stuff seems to do in BC in addition to the increase in Stamina. This means not only do people have more to heal but we need to heal them faster. I saw many posts from level 70 Priests talking about how much of an issue this could be.

• PW:S – scaling

Increases in damage output by other classes have currently turned this ability into more a damage mitigation tool then a real shield. Many classes can eat right through this in a single blow. Come level 70 this will be come even more apparent as the spell only scales up another 315 or so damage blocked. That is very low for an ability that is suppose to save a characters live. Further more the scaling of the spell is set at 10% of +healing from gear. With 500 in healing that is only 50 more damage blocked. Again that is nothing by todays standards. Many have suggested it either gets the same coefficient as other instant cast spells or even 100% coefficient like a DoT spell. Again this something that needs to be highly looked into.

I’ve been talking about this one for a long long time. I love the shield, and it is a class defining ability. I always had the improved PW:Shield when it reduced the cool down. The older WoW has got though the more gimped the Shield seemed to get. You can tell this by how useful the shield is at lower levels compared to when you were 60. Improving this would really help with some of our other issues, like survivability and be more of a quick save the group member type ability it used to be.

• Pain Suppression – Functionality, Cost and Appearance

Barkskin, a Druid ability, was just recently given the ability to be cast while stunned. A functionality that many agree Pain Suppression should have or should have had from the start. Pain Suppression has great potential to being used as a mitigate damage dealt by a Rogue to a Priest. Secondly is the long cooldown yet very short duration. The 3 min cooldown is still way to long. With such a cooldown the usefulness of the spell as only being situational is highly apparent. Reducing the Cooldown is highly recommended and agreed upon by many Priests in order to make the spell more useful. Lastly is the appearance. It is by far the most ghastly of all spells ever designed. It is like when a Priest wears Benediction in PVP, a big sign that says ‘gank me!’ Yet, in this case it says ‘Dispel or Purge Me!’. The most a Priest will then get out of Pain Suppression is 3 seconds worth, tops. Rather then make it do a big show of lights making not appear at all is one suggestion so that an attacker wouldn’t automaticly consider Dispelling or Purging it. Again like the above this is needing some major looking into.

Making PS castable while stunned is something that never came to mind. Then Blizzard went and gave this ability to Druids for barkskin an ability my druid didn’t even own. Now he does! I think the duration issues are right on the money as well. I like the idea of PS and if it is going to be kept Priest only ALL of these ideas really need to be implemented IMHO. This is based on my BC experience, I was a full disc Priest for most of the beta.

• CoH – Scaling and Targeting

Though nice for being an Instant cast spell with large range the spell doesn’t scale at all. In fact at level 70 it only heals 700 health. 700 health with health bars being 8000+ at level 70 is very small. It doesn’t justify the mana cost let alone the use of such a spell. Having it scale better with +healing and having a higher base amount of healing is highly requested. Lastly is the targeting of the spell. In a raid situation one would be lucky to have all the party members within 15 yards of the person you cast this on. Having it jump to Raid members as well as party is requested as this spell has much potential as being the first raid healing spell of its kind. Just like everything else please look into these as possible suggestions/changes.

Basically this is what Kalagan had promised very early in beta at least as far as being able to effect raid members. They were bent on it being able to only effect 5 people so the idea is it would heal the 5 lowest members. However this never came to be, they were too busy breaking Surge of Light and nerfing our Trans 3 piece bonus! They never promised anything about dealing with the amount it healed. Everyone who tested it felt it didn’t heal enough. For it to ever be useful it needs to heal for more. It suffers even more from point 1 basically.

• Rank 3 VT – Scaling issues

Not of as high a priority as all the other stuff the Rank 3 version of VT needs to be looked into for scaling in damage at level 70. Currently it is only another 50 points of damage for an extra 25 mana. Though proportional of mana to damage the spell should be scaled proportionally higher so that it becomes useful to use at level 70. In its current state it is in fact very close to pointless to use Rank 3 verses Rank 2.

I don’t ever pretend to know about Shadow Priests because I’ve never been one. I add this to the list because the person who originally posted these ideas was right on about the others so this one is probably correct too.

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